In the first few versions of the iPhone, Cydia was the go-to platform for buying apps for jailbroken devices. But Cydia founder Jay “Saurik” Freeman decided to shut down purchases in the Cydia app store going forward.
You can still access existing downloads through the store and make purchases through third parties, but apps cannot be purchased through Cydia.
One of the reasons why Cydia is shutting down app purchases involves a bug related to PayPal digital token authorization that affected a number of users. In a Reddit post, Freeman recommended users to remove PayPal accounts from their profiles.
Freeman was initially planning to shut this feature down by the end of the year, according to TechCrunch. However, the PayPal issue likely expedited his decision to do so. And the toll of running the service has affected his personal life and finances also contributed to this decision.
“The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year, and was considering moving the timetable up after receiving the report (to this weekend),” wrote Freeman via Reddit. “This service loses me money and is not something I have any passion to maintain: it was a critical component of a healthy ecosystem, and for a while it helped fund a small staff of people to maintain the ecosystem, but it came at great cost to my sanity and led lots of people to irrationally hate me due to what amounted to a purposeful misunderstanding of how profit vs. revenue works.
Freeman also pointed out that shutting this service does not help him financially as he still has to pay the hosting costs associated with the archived Cydia repositories. What will happen to Cydia in the future? Freeman is going to make more of a formal post next with plans for the company.
Photo Credit: Qkrwodhkls25 via Wikimedia
